Like groundhog day, Congress is back in the budget follies: debt ceiling, assaults on Social Security and Medicare – we are in for fights that are depressingly familiar. In the middle of all this, what progressives call the “bloated military budget” is said to be back on the table.
You’d think it was about time. Having spent the better part of 50 years focusing on the defense budget, I have almost never seen us spend so much – it will be over $850 billion this year, well above any non-war year and higher than almost every time we were at war in comparable (constant) dollars.
The media is all over the idea that even Republicans in the Congress will slash defense, so dedicated are they to fiscal responsibility. Indeed, a few hardy Republicans have actually said they might take a hard look at the military budget.
Ain’t going to happen. The conservative vision of “disciplining defense” is a fraud. And a lot of Democrats are not going to let defense walk the budgetary plank, either.
Folks are pointing to the recent press statement by the new president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, artfully entitled “Getting Serious About Responsible Defense Spending.” Note that the word “cut” does not appear in the title. Hope springs eternal; maybe Kevin really believes that we spend way too much on defense. That would be staggering news from Heritage, which has been circulating dire warnings for years that our defenses are in disrepair, we are falling behind China, and more money is the answer.
Not so fast. I thought I would lift the lid on what Roberts actually wrote. Turns out to be the usual collection of generalities Republicans have been using for years when they want to sound fiscally responsible about defense but won’t actually make many changes.
Like eliminating waste. Roberts wants to eliminate “wasteful” defense spending. (At least he left fraud and abuse off the list). There hasn’t been a politician or Secretary of Defense for decades who came into office supporting wasteful spending.
The tough part is defining waste. Years ago, I argued that the B-1 bomber was wasteful spending. Proved to be right. But for presidents and members of Congress, the B-1 was an absolute strategic necessity. Waste is in the eye of the beholder, but it is a slippery target.
Roberts goes deeper, once waste has been eliminated. He proposes getting rid of “unnecessary programs” and “uneeded bureaucrats.” His first target is “wokeness,” which he wants to cut “ruthlessly.” Even if such a thing as wokeness actually existed, there is no detail here about what budget lines fund it. My guess is there is no money there, certainly not enough to actually lower the defense budget. As for those pesky bureaucrats – is that the deep state we keep hearing about? Turns out the number of civil servants at DoD in 2022 is 25% lower than there were in 1987, one of the peak years for civil servants at DoD. Meanwhile, the defense budget was 14% higher than in 1987 (with three wars in between, to boot). (Sorry about the numbers, but, ya know, once a budget geek, always…).
The unnecessary stuff turns out to be $1.4 billion that funds non-defense research. No details. Probably includes cancer and HIV research at DoD, both of which happen to troops, too. Anyway, while that looks like a lot of money, it is .0013% of the defense budget.
Give me some real programs, Kevin! Something like national missile defense (still not working after 40 years and half a trillion dollars worth of effort) or the B-21 (another bomber???). No, he notes that Congress keeps funding more Boeing helicopters (CH-47) when the Pentagon doesn’t ask for them. Nice, but that was $170 million dollars, in savings, or .0002% of the defense funds for this year. He mentions excess base infrastructure. Services say they have too much; have said it for years; the number never changes.
He takes a well-worn shillelagh to the Europeans – they should “share the burden.” Of what? The US has military forces around the globe. The Europeans, who are now spending more, care about European security. That’s NATO’s mission; not the globe. Anyway, his proposal is to shift US forces to the Pacific if the Europeans pony up, which would save nothing at all.
Roberts is having his budgetary cake with all the icing left on. It’s a dodge, not a serious proposal.
It is damned hard to cut the defense budget. Why? Because the contents of that budget are carefully crafted in a close relationship I called the “Iron Triangle” when I wrote a book about it in 1980.
Defense is the 800-lb gorilla of government triangles. Industry and communities get jobs and money. The military services get the troops and weapons they want. Congress officiates over the marriage between the other two. Yes, yes, that is a simple construct. But it helps understand why so many defense programs stay in the budget past their sell-by date, excess infrastructure stays open, and there are a lot of military bureaucrats. There is always strategy, mission, and the ever-evolving “threats” out there to explain things. We overstated the Russian one; now we are overstating the Chinese one.
There is a really cute shell game that keeps things going. Up where I used to live in Maine, Bath Iron Works makes destroyers. The Navy is always willing to take more. But it is more possible if the Navy lets Susan Collins and Angus King take credit for adding a destroyer to what the Navy asks for. It’s a win-win – the Navy gets the boat; the Senator gets the credit.
I watched this game up close for five years at the White House budget office. It’s a system and it works to the benefit of all.
So how do we cut the budget? It has gone down at times in our history. Basically, only two ways. First, we get out of a war we got into. The forces shrink; we need fewer weapons. Happened after WW II, Korea, Vietnam, Cold War, Iraq (not so much Afghanistan; the China card was already being played).
Second, the defense budget goes down if it is thrown into the bigger budgetary arena. This only happens when there are caps on overall federal discretionary spending (the part that isn’t entitlements like Medicare and Social Security). Happened after the Gramm Rudman Hollings sequester law (1985), after the Budget Enforcement Act (1990), and the Budget Control Act (2011). For a while, defense budgets went down (hidden in the last case by emergency spending for the war in Afghanistan).
We have nearly 40 years of experience with these tradeoffs between guns and butter. Of course, there is a price. Domestic spending doesn’t get to grow. A lot of Democrats won’t go for this option, as a result. But it is the way defense budgets get cut.
I don’t expect it to happen, but a budget agreement might reinstate the caps as a way to get any budget at all through this divided Congress. One can always hope.
Well done, Gordon.
Possibly the elimination of the War College and the Pentagon would be a good start also.